


The Ram and the Raven

by Snabulous



Category: The Adventure Zone (Podcast)
Genre: Angst with a Happy Ending, Canon Compliant, F/F, Fairy Tale Style, Falling In Love, i woke up at 4am and wrote this in a desperate flurry, it's like minimally angsty though, pre-Petals to the Metal
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-02-04
Updated: 2020-02-04
Packaged: 2021-02-27 23:55:51
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,975
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22564372
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Snabulous/pseuds/Snabulous
Summary: Once upon a time, there was a ram and a raven.
Relationships: Hurley/Sloane (The Adventure Zone)
Comments: 8
Kudos: 7





	The Ram and the Raven

Once upon a time, there was a halfling and a raven. The raven was a thief, and the halfling was sworn to uphold the law with all of her being. She was tasked with capturing the raven and bringing her to justice, and she worked very hard night and day to complete her task. But despite her relentlessness, the halfling could never catch the raven. 

Then one night, the halfling discovered the raven’s nest: a garage in a seedy part of town, tucked away in a little alley in which she would never have thought to look. The raven was not there, but the halfling found something else instead: a magnificent battlewagon, enormous and gleaming, with black wings that seemed as though they might at any moment begin beating and fly away into the night.

The raven came home while the halfling was still in her nest, but the halfling was too awestruck by the battlewagon to arrest her. Instead, she asked the raven questions about the beautiful vehicle and the races beyond the city limits. 

Surprised by the halfling’s sincere, pure interest, the raven answered everything she was asked, unsure even within herself why she didn’t just get rid of the halfling, whose very existence threatened her freedom.

With her questions answered, the halfling left the raven’s nest with her head spinning and her heart racing, whether from fear, excitement, or enamoredness, she did not know.

The halfling came back the next day in the late evening. This time, rather than breaking in, as she had last time, she knocked. The raven, startled, let her in.

Sheepishly, the halfling asked the raven if she could join her in a race, just one, please, so she could get the funny feeling out of her head and satisfy her curiosity. The raven stared at the halfling, who had managed to surprise her every time they met. The halfling could be her partner for the next race, the raven agreed, but only if she stopped trying to hunt her down.

The halfling immediately promised never to arrest her, and the deal was made.

In the weeks before the next big race, the raven taught the halfling about battlewagon racing. She showed her how to use the mechanisms and how to use a battlewagon’s weakest points to take down other racers. She taught her everything she would need to know to survive the deadly race, all the while an undercurrent of something heart-pounding and unplaceable cackling between them.

The day of the race, the halfling transformed into the ram. It was a glorious transformation. The mask made her feel free. Suddenly, she knew why criminals cover their faces when committing their foul crimes: in this mask, she could do _anything_. The ram was unstoppable.

The ram and the raven destroyed the other racers. They came so far in first that there wasn’t even anyone to collect the second-place prize, so they won that too. And as they crossed the finish line and skidded to a halt inches from the cliff’s edge, the ram and the raven felt a surge of something bigger than them rise up in their chests. In a moment of thrill and adrenaline, they moved to kiss passionately, but their racing masks slammed into each other, blocking their advances. They laughed gleefully at the ridiculousness of it all, and when they finally made it back to the raven’s nest, they tried again, this time more intentionally, with soft eyes and mouths and touches.

After that, the ram and the raven raced together often. They became partners in multiple senses of the word, their passion for racing matched only by their passion for each other. 

By day, they would play a game of pretend cat-and-mouse, the ram chasing the raven around their town, a task that once felt hard and dutiful now turned to a playful joke between lovers. Though she continued to uphold the law otherwise, the ram kept her promise and never arrested the raven.

The ram and the raven were together for a long time, racing and loving each other more fiercely than either had loved anyone before, until the raven suddenly changed. She found something, some source of incredible power that she didn’t fully understand. The ram didn’t understand it either, and watching who the raven became with it was terrifying.

The raven gained immense control over nature, and the more power she acquired, the more unstable she got. The ram worried and worried and worried about the raven, fearing what might happen to her if this continued, what she might become. 

This pressure built and built, until one fateful race. 

The raven killed another racer in cold blood, violent and efficient, and at that moment something in the ram broke. They had been racing together for so long, but not once had they killed anyone. 

The ram and the raven won the race, but the ram refused to accept the prize and told the raven that she did not want to race with her anymore. The raven was hurt by this, unable to recognize the ram’s reasoning in her power-drunken state.

The ram thus transformed back into the halfling, too afraid to race or don her disguise.

The halfling continued to meet with the raven, loving her too much to stay away, but the raven grew distant. She turned more and more inside herself until she stopped telling the halfling anything anymore. At night, when they spent nights together in the tiny apartment above their garage, neither of them slept, instead lying silently beside the other, staring into the darkness. The halfling knew then that the raven was out of her reach now, though still mere inches away. This hurt the halfling more than losing racing, for she had lost the person that she cared for most out of the entire world.

One night, the raven closed the distance between them in a moment of lucidity. She told the halfling that she was afraid of the power she possessed, that nothing would ever be more powerful than her. If she held more power than anyone in the universe, then how could anyone ever stand between her and control over everything in existence?

When the halfling didn’t know what to say to this declaration of fear, the raven left her alone with her fear.

With that, the raven was gone from the halfling’s life. She was so alone then. As she had grown used to the raven’s constant company and affection, the halfling had forgotten how to deal with loneliness. So she went back to her old life, and she looked for the raven as she used to, but still could not find her. But the raven soon made herself known.

She attacked the bank in the center of town in a display of terrifying power. Thick, impenetrable vines wrapped the towering building until no one could enter to stop her. That is, until three mysterious adventurers, an elven wizard, a dwarven cleric, and a human fighter, appeared just as the situation seemed at its most dire. They managed to get inside the building and traveled up through it to fight the raven.

The halfling, knowing of the raven’s deadly power, was terrified, both for the adventurers and for the raven. What would she do if something happened to her? She wouldn’t be able to live with herself. So she steeled her resolve and made the treacherous climb up the twenty-story bank.

When she finally reached the end of her harrowing ascent, she threw herself through the glass-paneled roof and stopped the raven mere seconds away from murdering the adventurers.

The raven took one long look at the halfling and fled. The halfling wanted to chase after her, but the adventurers were gravely wounded. She healed them, and they promised to help her to take down the raven, telling her that it was their job to keep people safe too.

The halfling accepted their help and told them what she believed was the only way to save the raven:

A race. A perfect race, in which the raven could see that the power she wielded was not infallible and would be compelled to let it go. She was afraid that it could never be beaten, but if the halfling could prove that it was, she and the adventurers could save the world.

The halfling and the adventurers joined the next race with the battlewagon she had been preparing for the past few months, unable to keep her hands off of it, even after she gave up racing. It was exhilarating to be back on the track, and for a while, the halfling was the ram again. She deftly maneuvered the race, while the adventurers kept the other competitors at bay, and the ram felt happier than she had in weeks. Finally, she felt that hope had returned to her life.

However, her happiness did not last long.

Her plan didn’t work. When the adventurers and the ram beat the raven, she took it poorly. She hurtled off the cliff at the end of the racetrack. For a moment, the ram thought the raven was dead, dashed to pieces at the bottom of the ravine, and her heart shattered into a million pieces. How could she live now, alone in this world without the raven at her side?

But then the raven rose up from the ravine, harnessing every ounce of her power, creating a threatening display of deadly thorns and vines that terrified the ram. Was this what her beloved raven had become? If she wasn’t stopped now, she could destroy the whole world.

The ram and her new friends followed the raven over the cliff in their battlewagon, preparing to fight her one last time. The fighter among the adventurers tried to take her down by hacking at her vines, but it did not work. The cleric slung spells, but it did not work. The wizard harnessed an immense power to blast the raven with a fireball, but it did not work. With every hit, the raven only seemed to grow more powerful, summoning the deadliest thorns in the world to her side. With no happy end in sight, the ram finally realized what she had to do.

In the midst of the chaos, the ram thanked the adventurers for all their help, and, before they realized what she was doing, she charged up every ounce of magic within herself and charged at the raven. As she did so, the ram tapped into something deeper, something more fundamental than the power the raven held. The moment she came in contact, the world around her went white.

When she regained her sight, she beheld the most beautiful thing: the raven right above her, finally close enough to touch once more. The raven held the ram tightly, and the ram wanted to stay in this moment forever.

But she was dying. The deadly thorns had pierced her skin when she made her final attack, the burning poison now coursing through her veins. She felt it coming, and so did the raven. 

So, she offered to use her immeasurable powers one last time.

The ram’s death was not something the raven could allow, not now, not when she was the cause. With her last act using her powers, the raven channeled everything into the ram and herself. Their skin turned to bark and roots, branches stretching out from their intertwined forms and pink flowers blossoming. 

The raven and the ram became preserved in the form of a cherry blossom tree, forever and always intrinsically part of each other in the most wonderful way. Never again could anything come between them. And there they would stay until such time that the world needed them to rise once more from their rest in each other’s arms.


End file.
